It is cold at six-forty in the morning on a March day in Paris, and seems even colder when a man is about to be executed by firing squad.

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.

There is a delicate-looking plant native to North America called bleeding heart.

There are only two kinds of people in our town. The stupid and the stuck."

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

It was almost December, and Jonas was beginning to be frightened.